Stephen hawking how does he type

Search Menu. Date Updated :. Background Dr. Solution Dr. Conclusions Dr. His experiences illustrated the following: People can acquire a disability status at any age, from birth to advanced years. Accommodations change over time for those with degenerative conditions. Assistive technology can compensate for limitations relative to mobility and speech.

Having a disability does not exclude people from discovering and pursuing their passions in life. At first, Hawking relied on a hand-held clicker for help choosing his words, which were then synthesized to speech.

When he lost the use of his hands, Hawking needed an alternative to a clicker and that's when he switched to the use of a system that detects face movement. The program run by Intel that allowed Hawking to select characters and words is called ACAT or assistive context-aware toolkit. An infrared switch that was attached to Hawking's glasses would detect movement he made with his cheek that would stop the cursor or mouse from moving on the screen.

The program allowed Hawking to move his cheek to stop the cursor that automatically scanned a keypad, he wrote on his website.

After he had the first few characters of a word selected, the computer could usually predict what word he was going for based on studies of his past speeches and books.

When he first adopted this method, which one of his graduate students introduced in , it was painfully slow and prone to error. Artificial intelligence helped make the system faster. Frustrated with the speed at which he could communicate, Hawking reached out to Intel, which had in the past provided him with the computers he used to speak. His argument was that it would be difficult to predict what an AI that was able to evolve itself would want, presuming that it would naturally be predisposed to gather more resources to sustain itself.

In that case, it would rival humans for the finite amount of resources on the planet. But even if evil AI were averted, Hawking still saw a problem with autonomous technology: Wealth distribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.